


Jetlag - Circuit Speeders

by galvanity



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 12:56:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14671566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galvanity/pseuds/galvanity
Summary: Or: How Jetlag Got a HomeBackstory fic for my oc, set pre-war Senate ruled Cybertron, in a bad neighborhood. Written to establish where he gets his chems, and how he can afford them without a job.





	Jetlag - Circuit Speeders

**Author's Note:**

> Oops, I went and got attached to Stickershock just from writing this even though he was going to be a throwaway character.
> 
> Here's a shot of him and Jetlag chillin' together:  
> https://orig00.deviantart.net/b5ea/f/2018/076/f/0/jettie_mush_by_galvanity-dc66fgf.png

With a wing-rattling sigh, Jetlag comes to the realization that he’s almost out of speeders. He can feel exhaustion picking at the edges of his processor already, but he can’t take another dose yet, gotta make it last, just in case…

 

The trek to his supplier’s usual haunt takes longer than he’d like, but with a blown thruster, the best he can do is slow a fall, not cross a city. His struts ache and his HUD tries valiantly to ping him something about needing repairs. 

The light above the door is either off or out, and maybe that should deter him from entering the sleazy basement den, but it doesn’t. The door itself is locked, and maybe that should deter him, but it doesn’t either. This can’t wait. He’s got the passcode memorized anyhow, so it isn’t like the lock can stop him.

Usually the only illumination inside is a collection of mesmerizing plasma lamps, but when he enters, he finds himself awash in harsh fluorescent lights. Across the room, at the opening edge of the hallway, are two mechs.

He ducks behind a counter and holds as still as possible, hoping against all hope that somehow they’re blind or deaf or recharging on their pedes. Still, he unsubspaces his sword, careful not to scrape against anything.

After a few more moments without trouble, he takes a deep in-vent, and peers around the corner.

They’re facing away.

They look a little too polished to be his dealer’s usual clientele, and their pincers and matching paint jobs say, “organized thugs.” A blaster each, but meant for normal hands. Nothing special as far as armor goes. Bigger than him, but not really big. He nods to himself and shifts, readying himself before...

He vaults over the counter and sprints towards the duo, flinging himself slim sword-point first into one of them and catching the other with his outstretched legs. It slides between the plating almost easily, tries to resist on their internals, but the follow through of his chest colliding with the grip slams it through as he twists, angling those long legs to swipe at the other’s face. They lean back just in time for him to catch the very edge of their chin spur with the tip of his pede, and reflexively they snatch his ankle out of the air. 

He knows it’s a reflex by the moment of quiet, startled pause that they share, before he pushes off from the first mech, who seems to be caught up in trying to figure out through the feedback of damaged internals just how to get the sword out of their chassis, using the momentum to drive his heel into their face, cringing at the feeling of their claws scraping metal from what passes for his leg plating.

They recoil, and release him, and as soon as he’s hit the floor he scrambles back to his pedes, fakes out the stabbed mech with a few feints, and slips behind them to reclaim his sword with a yank. They stumble forward, and he plants a kick to the back of one of their knees, throwing off their catch just enough to half spill them into the floor for a second.

The other has reached for their blaster while he was busy, aiming it loosely with one pincer and tenderly guarding their bent facial ridge and busted lip. 

He turns and launches himself, heat searing through his wing as the sound of the shot echoes in his audials, optics shining bright with wild intent as he ducks their attempt at swatting him away and thrusts upwards, skewering their face on his blade.

They start to let out a scream before he guides them roughly down to optic level with him and clamps a hand over their mouth. Quiet washes over them as they realize that they’re still alive for the moment, and then they’re back to making muffled noises. Jetlag scrunches his face in distaste.

“Shh, shh, shut up and listen, fragger!” He punctuates the command with a small twitch of the blade, focus briefly trailing down the dull edges to follow a rivulet of energon that’s about to, oh. There it is. On his fingers now. Amazing.. His empty tanks try to ping him for attention, but he ignores it, and the shame that follows. “You wanna live? Go. You and your buddy get outta here. Or I dismantle you and sell the pieces. Got it?”

They start to move to nod, wince, and then make a sound enough akin to, “Uh-huh,” that he releases their face, and slowly retracts his tool. There’s no gush of energon, and he releases a tiny exvent he didn’t realize he had been holding. Nothing important nicked.

“Good. Now scram.”

Once they’re out the door, one pulling the other with tightly interlocked pincers, he stiffens, wings perking unevenly. He could have asked them who else was here! It didn’t have to be a surprise!

“Augh, you dolt, why are you like this?” he grumbles to himself as he half jogs down the hallway, flicking droplets of energon from his wing and sword as he moves.

 

The door at the end of the hall, on the left, is, predictably, locked. This one, he doesn’t know the code to, either. But…

Through the wall of the adjacent room, as he excavates a pathway through the junk to a closet door, he can hear muffled squabbling between his dealer and someone he doesn’t recognize the voice of. And an unfortunately familiar cackle.

It’s a pain to squeeze through the barely openable closet door, and even more of a pain to scrape past the jaggedly broken wall within, but it brings him to his favorite kind of door: one without locks.

He considers that it would be a good idea to listen a moment to figure out how many people are in the room and where-ish they are, but only once he’s already moving to fling himself out and towards the nearest stranger. Whoops.

 

The room is obscenely bright, and he can’t tell much about the frame he’s throwing himself at aside from the similarly blisteringly bright white and yellow paint job, so it takes him by surprise when they just kind of… Tumble into the floor with him. They twine their arms around him, and a set of tiny -snikt- sounds makes his fuel pump stutter. Immediately he begins to thrash and try to pull away, earning needle thin scores in his metal as they grapple with him for purchase. 

The sounds of Stickershock’s enthusiastically violent encouragement is distant in his audials over the clash of plating against plating as they struggle. They snug him closer, and wedge their slim arms beneath his wings, muttering something in a thick Protohexian accent as they finally find purchase for their needles, and a wave of desperate panic washes over him. He buries his face in the crook of their neck cabling, and sinks his dentae deep, ripping in like a feral mechanimal.

A garbled yowl rings in his processor while the taste of half processed energon and electrical impulses arc over his glossa, and the needles whip back out of his frame so they can forcefully launch him backwards into the floor. His frame resists his first attempt to hop back to his pedes, inertia and a hundred suddenly unhidden pings in his HUD in a dazzling array of red, red, and red leaving him momentarily starstruck before the sharp shift of his elbow falling out of alignment snaps him back into focus.

 

He flings himself up, and remagnetizes his joint back into place with a soft scrape, then hurries over to Stickershock’s side. The cuffs holding him in place are mercifully easy to crack from the outside, splitting open with just a couple jolting prys from his blade. 

“Oh m-n, you’re a si--t fo- --re optics!” he says, shaking out the discomfort of being locked in place for however long. Jetlag squints at him, briefly thrown by the distortion, but he either doesn’t or can’t notice it. “Le-’s slag --m!”

He pulls him forward by the wrist, petite servo straining to wrap all the way around, jerking him some with each bouncy little step. 

“Ow, o-, --, ow, aw f--- me!” It wasn’t Stickershock, it was him. Fantastic. The minibot gave him a squeeze but kept his gaze locked on the mech frantically trying to unlock the door before they could reach him. No dice, though. The keypad was to disguise the fact that it actually operated by card, not code.

When his buddy came to a stop, so did he, straightening up as best he could before getting his sword back out. 

The mech, slender, around his own size but actually built that way, froze and then let out a despairing holler for help, presumably from the goons that he’d already sent home. Energon gushed down their chest plates, bright against pale, well maintained paint, and the longer he stared the more his vision swam. 

*** Fuel reserves at 7%, entering stasis mode in 47 minutes ***  
>hide notification

A knock knock on his thigh startled him back out of his HUD, and he glanced down at Stickershock, who pointed towards the other mech, mouthed something before breaking into a bout of surreally muffled laughs. 

“W--t?”

“---g ---! -- --. --- --m, --g g-y!” He punctuated his… Whatever he said by pounding one fist into the palm of his other servo. 

He shrugged, and half swaggered half stumbled forward, and in a burst of motion, shunked the tip of his sword into the sensitive mechanisms of their shoulder, managing to skewer it and dig into the door behind them through sheer momentum. Their face crumpled in pain, then snapped to attention as he began twisting and twining their ragged neck cables around his digits. 

None of the sounds of his slurred threats reached his own audials, but the trembling frame pinned before him seemed to be picking up on them just fine. A weight on his wings almost startled him, before a little servo making rude gestures came into his field of view. Wow. No sense of personal space.

After a pat to the side of his helm, he jerks his sword free of their shoulder and steadies himself on the wall beside the door. The door which suddenly opens. The mech darts out on shaking pedes, leaving behind spatters of dripping energon on the floor.

He follows after them at a casual pace, and stops at the front door, locks it, and then hits his knees. The minibot on his shoulders dismounts heavily, and starts chattering, but none of it registers.

He flops onto his back on the floor, and pops a couple bloodied fingers into his mouth out of desperation. The energon is fresher on the surface, with a congealed layer beneath it from his first encounter, and it tastes so sweet around the tang of coolant and the gritty dirt and paint chips and he tries really, really hard to get out a, “You fragging owe me, Sticky, you so fragging owe me,” around them but he isn’t really sure how much of it came out.

After a while, Stickershock coaxes his hand away from his mouth, and starts nudging and prodding him until his cockpit clicks, and swings open. The seating area within has been converted into a series of separate intake ports, each with their own plug, leading directly to his fuel tanks and circumventing his filters. He eases a pair of the plugs out, pauses, then presses the nozzle of an injector into their places.

Their contents burn a short trail to his tanks, and he squirms uselessly in the floor before being slowly dragged upright. 

“--me on, --t up f-r a sec.” Choppy sound returns somewhat as the heat pools within his frame, and when the edge of something cool and firm presses against his lips, he opens his mouth obediently. Energon!

His optics snap open, and he clumsily tries to take the cube into his hands, but the smaller hands remain firm beneath his.

“St-p tha-, you’re gonna sp--- it, ya -ftchaser!” He puts on an over the top frown, but he can’t seem to stop himself from laughing. Slowly, much more slowly than he’d like, the minibot tips the cube for him, careful not to let him overwhelm himself. Once it’s empty, he hops up and trots off to toss it back into storage. 

Jetlag exvents heavily, wings sagging with sluggish contentment and twitching slightly at the now distinct clinking of the cube’s landing. He resets his sensory inputs a few times to shake off the last few glitches, then stretches back out across the floor in a lazy sprawl to wait for the other’s return.

 

“Oh hey, you look like slag. How many times did they play kickball with you before they cuffed you?” 

“Hey, I’ll have you know that the cuffs came first!” he laughs, taking a self conscious look down at his dented plates.

He points a finger at him while manually closing up his cockpit. “‘S like I said, you fragging owe me.” 

The laughter dies off, and his gaze sinks to the floor. After a moment, he says, “Yeah… I really do, don’t I.” He comes closer, and offers him a hand. “C’mon, lay on the couch for me and I can patch your wing while we talk.. Payment.”

The jet kicks himself up and lands on his feet with only a wobble, and presses his wings back to look at him over his shoulder. His optics narrow as he considers his offer. Finally, he says, “Better be good. Unless you’re looking forward to handling this yourself next time.”

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus:  
> https://orig00.deviantart.net/9615/f/2018/076/1/a/jettie_dump_by_galvanity-dc660bj.png  
> Practice drawings of Jetlag


End file.
